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Report: Grand Junction has second most iPads in nation per capita

By {screen_name}
Tuesday, May 4, 2010

When it comes to Apple’s latest technological gadget, Grand Junction-area residents and visitors have definitely discovered there’s an app for that.

A recent report issued by Net Applications, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Internet tools and services provider, ranked the Grand Junction metropolitan statistical area second in the U.S. with the largest concentration of iPads.

Grand Junction had a 0.23 percent Internet share, meaning that the percentage of people living or visiting here have used the electronic tablet since its retail introduction a month ago. Assuming Grand Junction’s metropolitan area’s population hovers around 140,000, that equates to roughly 320 iPad users in Mesa County.

“There’s something there that drives a higher percentage of iPad users than other places,” said Vince Vizzaccaro, vice president of marketing for Net Applications.

Shocked? So, too, is Jesse Dodd, president of the Grand Mesa Mac Users Group and an iPad owner.

“It seems to me like it would be just the opposite,” Dodd said. “I would assume that most of the purchases of the iPad would be Apple enthusiasts. This just isn’t a real hotbed for that.”

Net Applications based its report on tracking traffic on more than 40,000 business websites and 3 million personal websites. Vizzaccaro said the company can identify the platform and Web browsers people are using, as well as users’ geographic location. He emphasized that the data is based on usage, rather than the purchase, of iPads in the Grand Junction area.

Vizzaccaro said people seem to be using iPads primarily for browsing magazine and news websites and for reading books. Dodd called the iPad’s Web browsing “amazingly quick.”

Vizzaccaro noted the 1.1 percent margin of error for Grand Junction’s Internet share, a percentage that was higher than any of the top 65 metro areas. He said Grand Junction’s relatively small population is reflected in that margin for error.

“The more traffic we can gather from an area, the smaller the margin of error,” he said.